The Wheel Keeps on Turning

All of you who are interested this sort of thing will have found the brouhaha on Jonathan McCalmont’s site days ago. McCalmont had some slighting things to say about Tor.com and a couple of bloggers from the Tor community, including John Scalzi, tied into him. They’re collectively giving a verbal martial arts demonstration of a kind that harkens back to Science Fiction Review, the hottest fanzine of the late 1960s. Real “go for the jugular, with a kick to the groin” stuff that makes a person wax nostalgic for the days of Harlan Ellison and J. J. Pierce.

There are two important differences, however. McCalmont is a lot more resilient and intellectually sound than Pierce was — it’s a shame I disagree with him about Tor.com (finding it hard to object to another source of good writing.) And one of the (probably many) differences between Ellison and Scalzi is that Scalzi has a genuine flair for self-deprecating humor. A recent example is: It’s Official: I’m Less Intelligent Than a Worm. That sense of humor leaves room to hope that McCalmont and Scalzi, after they wear each other out, might make their peace and exit the scene like John Wayne and Victor McLaglen in The Quiet Man.

[Via SF Signal.]

5 thoughts on “The Wheel Keeps on Turning

  1. I assume so too. But that would have been before I was aware of the duel with McCalmont. I took it for another generic rant.

  2. I think the first would require a level of literary sophistication that I am entirely lacking. I could just about cope with He-man and Skeletor but anything above that and you’ve lost me 😉

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